Journalists and others with a tendency to see glasses as half empty have a long history of pronouncing the American consumer maxed out. "Time for a New Frugality," this magazine declared in 1973. "Over the Ears in Debt," it chimed in again in 1987. It wasn't just TIME. Historian of credit Lendol Calder has assembled a long list of worried headlines through the decades: "Debt Threatens Democracy" (Harper's, 1940), "Is the Country Swamped with Debt?" (Business Week, 1949), "Never Have So Many Owed So Much" (U.S. News & World Report, 1959). And so on.
记者们带着悲观的有色眼镜，冷眼观察着美国进入了消费信贷时期，这种状况历史悠久。“新的节约时代来临”本刊1973年曾写道。“吵杂的债务清单”1987年又有类似报道。但这不是《时代》的独家爆料。信贷历史学家Lendol Calder汇集了这几十年来一长串类似的头条：《债务已经威胁到民主》（《时尚》，1940）、《美国会被债务淹没吗？》（《商业周刊》，1949）、《从没见过这么多债务》（《美国新闻与世界报道》，1959），等等等等。
Amid all this hand-wringing, Americans have kept piling on more and more debt. The last significant episode of belt-tightening came during the recession of the early 1980s. But that turned out to be just the prelude to a quarter-century of growing profligacy, capped by a final half-decade of mostly mortgage-related fun that will go down as one of the most reckless borrowing-and-lending binges ever.
美国人对于接踵而至的债务清单手忙脚乱。上一次勒紧腰带还是在80年代经济衰退时期。但这被证明是后来的25年不断浪费的序幕，在后十几年里不断增加的不理智抵押贷款，终于导致了必然的借贷混乱。
Now that particular binge has come to a crashing end, and the credit worriers believe their moment may have finally arrived. "I'm not saying we're going back to our parents' level of frugality," says David Rosenberg, North American economist at Merrill Lynch. "But what we have witnessed in the past 20 to 30 years — and especially the parabolic credit growth of the last five years — is going to be bursting in the next decade."
现在这种混乱接近了崩溃的边缘，信贷烦恼者相信他们的末日就要到了。“我并不认为我们会回到父母那种勒紧裤腰带过日子的水平，”美林证券北美经济学家David Rosenberg说，“但是我们在过去的20到30年间的行为——特别是最近五年抛物线般的信用增长——会在下一个十年里爆发危机。”
Americans simply don't have enough money to pay back the mortgage and credit-card debt they've run up. That reality is forcing banks to retrench as loans gone bad shrink their capital bases and falling house prices shrink the collateral that homeowners can borrow against. And it will presumably force chastened consumers to change their ways as well. At least that's what Rosenberg is predicting. "It's an entirely new attitude toward debt," he says. "It is the new four-letter word."
美国人根本没有足够的钱来赎回预支出的抵押和信用卡债务。随着坏账耗损了他们的资本基础，这种状况迫使银行减少；但下跌的房价带来的副作用是屋主必须增加借贷。这会使得消费者更改他们的消费方式。至少，这是Rosenberg的推测。“必须对债务采取全新的态度，”他说，“用全新的概念来定义债务。”
This will, if it doesn't get out of hand (as in Great Depression out of hand), be a healthy development. Currently intractable-seeming problems like the country's yawning trade deficits and its big future retirement bills would soon be reduced to a manageable size if Americans actually began spending less than they earned.
如果事态尚在可控范围内的话（大萧条尚未发生），这是一个良性的发展方法。现在最棘手的是国家持续的贸易赤字和它要为未来支付的大额退休福利，它们会给维护带来很大的困难。但是如果美国人现在开始多挣少花的话，事情尚有转机。
Several polls have shown that large majorities are planning to use the tax rebate coming later this year to pay off debt rather than buy new stuff. Beyond that, evidence of a major attitude change is still sparse.
不少调查都指出，大多数人都计划使用今年的退税来偿还债务，而不是购买新品。除此之外，其他方面并没有证据表明美国人的态度有多少改变。
"People are more aware than they were two years ago," says get-out-of-debt guru Dave Ramsey of the callers to his radio show, which airs on 350 stations around the country. "I don't know if they're doing anything about it."
“比起两年前，人们已经算是更为理智了，”还债先锋Dave Ramsey在他的广播秀（全国有350个地区可以收听）里说道，“只不过处理方法各有千秋。”
Ramsey, who also has written a couple of best-selling advice books and is a regular on the new Fox Business Network, does allow himself to dream. "It's like a whole generation woke up one morning and realized that cigarettes kill you," he muses. "Maybe a whole generation will wake up and realize that collecting points on your Discover card doesn't make you rich."
Ramsey已经出版了两本关于消费建议的书，与此同时他还是福克斯商业网络正式员工。他对未来抱有希望。“就像某天早晨所有人都觉醒，认识到吸烟有害健康一样，”他开玩笑道，“也可能突然间所有人都清醒过来，发觉收集Discover点数并不会发财。”
